El Nino Update: Monster Kelvin Wave Continues to Emerge and Intensify

Record global temperatures, extraordinarily severe storms for the US West Coast and telegraphing on through the Central and Eastern US, a disruption of the Asian Monsoon and various regional growing seasons, record heat and drought in Northern Australia, severe drought and fires in the Amazon, the same throughout Eurasia and into the Siberian Arctic, another potential blow to Arctic sea ice. These and further extreme impacts are what could unfold if the extraordinarily powerful Kelvin Wave now racing toward the Pacific Ocean surface continues to disgorge its heat.

The pool of 4-6+ degree Celsius above average temperatures continues to widen and lengthen, now covering 85 degrees of longitude from 170 East to 105 West. Perhaps more disturbing is the fact that the zone of extreme 6+ C temperature anomalies has both widened and extended, covering about 50 degrees of longitude and swelling to a relative depth of about 30-40 meters. This is an extraordinarily intense temperature extreme that well exceeds those observed during the ramp-up to the record 1997-98 El Nino event.

Meanwhile, a smaller, but still disturbing, zone of 3-6+ C above average temperatures has now developed just 100 feet below the surface along a line near 100 degrees West Longitude. It is a very strong heat pulse, the head of the Kelvin Wave that by late March had pushed its nose up in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific.

In the above NOAA graph we can see the hot, deep pool in the Western Pacific gradually flowing eastward, spreading out and shallowing as it begins to dump its heat content back into the atmosphere. A return of stored ocean heat that will, likely, spike global atmospheric temperature values all while sparking off a series of very extreme weather events.

Warm Storms Continuing to Pull Heat Eastward and Upward

The west-to-east progression and upwelling of Pacific Ocean heat is currently facilitated by low pressure systems lining up along the equator. The lows are fed by heat and evaporation bleeding off the Pacific Ocean surface. This heat enhances the formation of thunderstorms that join into larger, heat-driven cyclonic systems. The countervailing circulations of these systems act to slow the trade winds while allowing the hot pool to spread further and further east.

It is a pattern that tends to emerge at the beginning of most El Nino events. A self-reinforcing cycle that draws energy from ocean surface heat even as its intensity is enhanced more and more by heat transfer from the depths.

(GFS model guidance through April 13 shows a persistent cyclone off New Guinea interrupting the trade winds — lower left — even as a long trough is predicted to form over the Eastern Pacific just north of the Equator — lower right. This pattern would tend to enhance the formation of El Nino conditions throughout the forecast period. Image source: NOAA)

It is the kind of cycle in which the excess Ocean heat, amplified by human-caused global warming, and long stored in the Pacific, as Dr. Kevin Trenberth well observed, may now be coming back to haunt us.

Conditions of a Human-Altered ENSO Cycle Compared to the Most Recent Warming at the End of the Last Ice Age

The La Nina to El Nino cycle (ENSO) is part of a larger ocean and air energy transfer pattern in which heat is periodically stored in the vast equatorial waters of the Pacific before being returned again to the atmosphere. In a normal climate state, this dance of heat energy between the airs and the waters would result in simple periodic variation appearing at the peak of either La Nina (atmospheric cool extreme) or El Nino (atmospheric warm extreme). But because human warming has now added a very strong and rapid heat forcing to this natural cycle of variability, La Nina periods have displayed slower rates of atmospheric warming (where they should have showed cooling) and El Nino periods have often resulted in temperatures spiking to new global records.

Natural variation, in this case, rests on a curve that we are forcing to bend inexorably upward.

Of the .8 degrees Celsius worth of annual global warming experienced since the 1880s, about .15 C, or nearly 20 percent of this warming, occurred during the powerful 1997-98 El Nino event in which vast amounts of stored ocean heat returned to the atmosphere. Since 1998, the Pacific Ocean has undergone a long period of La Nina events in which a large store of atmospheric heat was transferred to the global ocean system. But despite this enormous heat transfer, global temperatures continued to climb with new records achieved in 2005 and 2010 during relatively weak to moderate El Nino events.

For the currently emerging El Nino, all indications point toward it being as strong or stronger than the extraordinarily powerful 1997-98 El Nino, perhaps readying to raise global temperatures by another .15 C or more.

(April 1 Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly Map shows a band of 1-3 C above average temperatures covering the Equatorial Pacific. It’s a marked difference from the slightly cooler than average conditions that have dominated for much of the past year. Given the current Pacific Ocean weather context and the very strong Kelvin Wave lurking just beneath the surface, it appears to be the start of a powerful El Nino phase. Image source: NOAA/ESRL)

For context, the difference between the 1880s and the last ice age was about 4 degrees Celsius. A temperature change that took about 10,000 years to complete. The total current warming of .8 C is equal to about 20% of the difference between the 19th Century and an ice age, but on the side of hot. This warming occurred at extraordinary velocity, over the course of little more than a century. An extreme pace of warming now between 30 and 40 times faster than that at the end of the last ice age. A pace of global heat accumulation that has not been seen in at least 65 million years.

In the current cycle of human warming, a strong El Nino can push that measure by as much as 5% or more in just a single year. So we may well see global average temperatures of 1 C higher than 1880s values by the end of 2014-2015 should the current and very powerful El Nino continue to emerge.

92 Comments

It’s an interesting question – if you’re right about a significant increase in extreme weather if a strong El Nino unfolds – how much damage to infrastructure and agriculture we should expect as a result? I’ve operated on the assumption that the loss of the Arctic ice will be the key driver of increasingly extreme weather and not perhaps considered other drivers adequately. It’s been so long since we had a real El Nino and the baseline experience of the weather has (already) changed so much in even that last decade alone that I’m not sure we really know what to expect, or how bad it might be (or not)?

El Nino has always generated extreme weather for certain regions. In any case, sea ice loss is certainly a primary driver as well. The issue is that you hit a heat exchange extreme during El Nino. Add that on top of global warming and you have a strong driver for extreme weather.

It’s not a question of either sea ice loss or El Nino. It’s both, with human warming as the man behind the curtain.

Has always produced extreme weather – sure – but I’m arguing our definition of what really counts as extreme is going to need to change, as what we used to call extreme is going to be called “normal”, and then “mild”.

The processes that amplify extreme weather due to human-caused warming are overlying an extreme weather generating event — El Nino. So the amping up of the hydrological cycle and sea ice related Jet Stream changes are likely to generally increase the tendency for extreme weather during El Nino.

The US West Coast receives severe storms during winter El Ninos. I’d expect that pattern to be amplified. For the US East Coast, we tend to get very strong Nor’Easters and coastal lows. We might well expect to see some serious bombs coming our way this winter due to the El Nino enhanced convergence of two storm tracks along a deep diving Jet Stream sped up in the zone south of Hudson Bay and Greenland.

Is there any ultimate impact on arctic ice melt from dumping all that extra heat back to the atmosphere? Does it imply slightly stronger atmospheric and oceanic circulation driving heat northwards again for instance? Or anything more direct and immediate?

My opinion is that the El Nino pattern will unfold in a similar fashion to past events but with alterations based on how the system has been distorted by human warming. I’d expect precipitation and drought extremes to increase, storms to be generally more intense due to heat transfer, and for zones to shift northward and southward depending on hemisphere.

Dear Robert, is this correct?
”Perhaps more disturbing is the fact that the zone of extreme 6+ C temperatures has both widened and extended, covering about 50 degrees of longitude and swelling to a width of about 30-40 meters.” 30-40 meters width is next to nothing, or are you referring to depth?
kind regards,
Rob

Mark Archambault

Robert, great update. That wave looks ominous – though it may be as comfortable as a hot tub.

A few questions:

1. How long does it take for such a Kelvin wave to discharge its excess heat to the atmosphere? Months? A year?
2. How soon after the above does it take for the extra heat to be felt in terms of heat waves or higher than ave. temperatures regionally and/or globally?
3. How likely is it that El Nino conditions continue into subsequent years? Is that typical or atypical? Thanks.

mikkel

I wonder if this will make the end of the PDO negative phase the same way the 98 marked the end of the positive phase. It appears a pattern is forming in which PDO+ leads to consistent increases in global temperature while PDO- leads to pauses and the transitions dump out a huge amount of energy at once. It seems unfathomable but I would not be surprised by a 0.15 step now and then an (average) 0.05 /year over the next 15 years, leading us to more than double our warming.

“The situation is tense in Russia this year. Because of low precipitation, the season has begun almost 1.5 months ahead of the norm,” the minister said. Seventeen fires have already been registered across a territory of 2,000 hectares, the minister said.

Tom

Great follow-up post Robert. This has implications for weather everywhere which, added to the melting Arctic ice causing a meandering jet stream, could be catastrophic in some areas.

I saw this morning an article showing how the survivors of Typhoon Haiyan are having problems relocating because of government policy (and the fact that there isn’t anywhere near enough land to relocate the tens of thousands of families that want to leave the coast). This type of problem will be repeated over the coming years in many lands.

Andy

The TAO network was a good source, however due to lack of funding it is gradually collapsing (my post about 4 posts up has a link on this issue). The data is still good, however the gaps in it mean we do not see the full scope & scale.

We’ve been getting pounded by rain up here in the pacific northwest. Not in terms of frequency, but of intensity. Earlier this week, we had two consecutive days of brutal downpours that stunned longtime residents. The skies seemed to open up. A lot of folks have been describing the weather as a “monsoon” or as the “pineapple express.”

Mark Archambault

Unrelated to the El Nino, but an event alert for those living in New England, that Robert would appreciate:

First Parish in Concord, MA Sunday Morning Forum
“What Does my Hamburger Have to do with Climate Change?”
with Sonia DeMarta

Sunday, April 6, 10:30AM-Noon in the First Parish Chapel

Come learn about food, agriculture and farming, and how they affect our carbon footprint. In this presentation, Sonia DeMarta will review the various issues related to agriculture that contribute to global warming, and how we can reduce our reliance on carbon. Food waste, organic farming, agrochemicals, and food miles, will all be covered in her lively presentation. We will also discuss current and ongoing local food-related initiatives.

Sonia DeMarta has a master’s degree in Environmental Management from Boston University, with a focus on food production. She is passionate about food, farming, agriculture, nutrition and their relationship to global climate change. Sonia founded the Lexington Farmers’ Market in 2005 and has been educating adults, children and teens about food and cooking ever since.

Sunday morning forums at First Parish in Concord are all free and open to the community.

Robert, I have a double question; and if it pleases you, I’d like your response to it. Is it true that there was a short spike in temps at the beginning of the Holocene at 7F (3 to 4C) hotter than today, and if so, why did it not run away into a hothouse back then? You see, John Michael Greer, whose blog The Archdruid Report I also follow, cited this a couple of weeks ago as backup to his assertion that we definitely won’t experience out of control global overheating and possible human extinction this time around.

Weir Bohnd

Obviously, there was a time when an Archdruid was the goto guy for questions concerning climate change. Apparently, Greer maintains tradition by answering a question with a question. It is the good fortune of present day druids and wannabe druids that they can now seek answers at the temple of the Holy Search Engine.

A good indicator to why it couldn’t run away was that CO2 concentrations were lower than 300 ppm at the beginning of the Holocene. That’s not enough for natural variations to throw earth off balance as its well within the normal carbon cycle. So short term natural variations (no doubt caused by the Milankovich cycle optimal position for maximum heat from the sun) would not last longer than the gradual cooling one would expect from the earths position again moving towards less incoming energy from the sun.

A big difference between anything happened in the past 600.000 years (and very likely earlier) is that CO2 levels today are now 40% higher than it maximum has been. We are nowhere equilibrium with regards to this so continued warming will commence as long as the CO2 levels stay this elevated.

In any case, Arctic research refutes the notion that any time during the Holocene was hotter than the present (recent papers show the Arctic is now hotter than at anytime in the last 40,000 years and likely the last 200,000 years). What is more disturbing is the fact that this research takes into account 20th Century averages. If we were to look at the current Arctic at +3 C hotter than 1880s values, we are probably looking at an Arctic hotter than at any time in the last 400 K years.

Dr Daniel Schrag has a good lecture from a geologists viewpoint. In this he mentions the best evidence that the current warming is exceptional is one presented by Lonnie Thompson who studied Glaciers near Equator/The Tropics and does ice core drilling. They can see the top of the glaciers are melting so fast that the banding in the ice is being destroyed from the top – and this has never happened before in this interglacial.

And these days they can find moss that haven’t seen light of day since the last interglacial.

In Norway there is a new kind of archaeology happening, they find several thousand year old things deposited by ice melting away. Things that the people thousands of years back lost on top of the ice. Some of it is excellently preserved too.

Phil

Cyclone Ita that caused the Solomon Island’s flooding now approaching far north Queensland as a Category 5 storm. If the ‘coast hugger’ GFS and JTWC forecast tracks were to emerge, northern cities like Cairns, Townsville and Bowen are in big trouble. Expected land impact late tomorrow afternoon/early evening.

Mark Archambault

Interesting. I don’t recall ever seeing a suggestion, now apparently in doubt, that El Nino could become permanent in a hot world. So I guess the El Nino – La Nina (PDO) cycle operates even when the pacific ocean is much warmer.

Today’s guest blog post is by Dr. Michael Ventrice, an operational scientist for the Energy team at Weather Services International (WSI). This is a follow-up post to the one he did on February 21 on the progress of El Niño. Today’s post is very technical! – Jeff Masters

Mark Archambault

NOAA’s climate predication center, from which Robert obtained that great clip of the Kelvin wave, seems to be downplaying the chances of an El Nino later this year, only giving it a 50% chance, as seen in this quote from their March 31 report below:

ENSO Alert System Status: El Niño Watch
• ENSO-neutral conditions continue.*
• Equatorial sea surface temperatures (SST) were above-average near the International Date Line and near-average in the east-central Pacific.
• ENSO-neutral is expected to continue through the Northern Hemisphere spring 2014, with about a 50% chance of El Niño developing during the summer or fall.*

In a one-hour documentary on Sunday, Ann Curry will be reporting on an angle of climate change that is scarcely found on TV news: that “there is virtually no debate among climate scientists”–climate change is real and “largely caused by human activity.” Curry will travel to areas high and low in the world, from the Arctic to the Florida seas, and speak to eyewitnesses of the devastating consequences of climate change, NBC News announced Thursday.

Mark Archambault

Unfortunately, when I clicked on the link, it said the content is not available to those outside of Australia. I guess I’ll have to get down there to watch it. Unfortunately, that would burn a lot of carbon!

Phil

Mark, Sorry about that – I was not aware of that restriction. Pitty, it was a very good program. In it they tended to emphasise land based permafrost and also methane emissions from lakes. They did not mention methane emissions from arctic seabeds however.

Mark Archambault

Pretty good program for the mainstream media. They featured Dr. Jennifer Francis quite prominently. The only improvement I would suggest is that a graphic showing the loss of arctic summer sea ice from 1980 to the present would have brought that point home more forcefully. It would also have been educational to mention just how much warmer its projected to get by century’s end. There were very few numbers discussed, which is perhaps that the producers intended for a general audience.

Tom

I agree Mark – it was an important “start” to getting the message out to the mainstream. It lacked a bunch of salient points, not least of which was loss of habitat that supports not only humans but all the other species with which we share the planet, but at least the word got out that there’s trouble ahead.

james cole

Siberia is called “The Green Sea” in Russia. I have seen it from the Urals stretching off into the horizon. The fire potential is so vast if dry hot weather continues, this could be another feedback monster that rears it’s head before anyone even notices it. Amazon drought and a Siberian fire storm. How much can the atmosphere take? Amazon fires are by no means tamed either. They are such a problem that nothing seems able to stem the tide of fire down there. Lower humidity overall has caused fires to keep expanding where once they went out on their own. And Australia! Remember the fires of the past 8 years or so! Epic!

Mark Archambault

Phil

Yes, will be interesting to see how high the figure gets this year. Seems well on the way to a value above 403. It would be interesting to contrast this (and methane measurments) also with meaurements in the arctic.

james cole

This tells it all. From the Siberian times. “In October last year, Norwegian and Russian scientists said that surface water in the Barents Sea was 5 degrees Celsius warmer than normal. They linked the peak-temperatures with the unusually warm summer in the northernmost parts of mainland Norway and on Russia’s northern Kola Peninsula.

The reports came in the same week as a UN panel predicted increasing ‘permafrost degradation in Siberia’ as one the globe’s key trends in the coming years.”

Mark Archambault

Thanks Colorado Bob for your reply about Robert and also for that article link. How dry can Australia get? And the article makes it clear that agriculture around the globe will likely take a big hit. Interesting times ahead.

BEIRUT — Syria is heading for a record low harvest this year, the United Nations warned Monday, putting the food supply for millions of civilians at risk as drought adds to the misery of the country’s war-weary population.

james cole

The “Heartland Institute” is back at it just releasing a report that rising CO2 is beneficial for earth. Copied from the notorious Daily Mail in the UK. “‘The ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content is causing a great greening of the Earth,’ says the report, called Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts.

‘All across the planet, the historical increase in the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration has stimulated vegetative productivity.”

Weir Bohnd

I guess Senator Sessions probably forgot about that oil platform that Katrina stuffed under a bridge in Mobile. Could it be that all the previous times that happened the press just didn’t think it was important enough to report? The question that pops into my head is why would a person devoted to reality want to work in a government dominated by the likes of Obama, Kerry, Holder, Nuland, Rice, Powers and the Five Horsemen of the Supreme Apocalypse.

The Heartless Ones probably meant to report that all that CO2 is greening the owners of the earth who are making fortunes from the production of all that CO2. But, that’s unfair. I think it’s quite possible that the earth will indeed green up again, after it has been desertified for awhile. For a glimpse of what it might be like, go to youtube or netflix and search for titanoboa. You’ll get to see renderings of the giant snake Guy McPherson likes to mention, and other creatures you wouldn’t want to meet down at the swamp. Just to close the circle, the fossils were found in a coal pit.

It’s not just your imagination: weather-related power outages are happening a lot more often than they used to. It’s yet another effect of the increasingly crazy weather we’re seeing — weather that, with climate change, is only expected to get crazier. In other words, as a new report from Climate Central emphasizes, climate change is a nightmare for our electrical system.

Between the mid-1980s and 2012, the report found, the number of major power outages (“major”, in this case, meaning they affected more than 50,000 homes or businesses) increased tenfold. Some of that may be due to inconsistent reporting, but since 2003, when that reporting improved, it found that weather-related blackouts have doubled. About 147 million customers lost power for at least an hour between 2003 and 2012. And major outages, according to recent estimates, cost Americans between $20 and $55 billion every year.http://www.salon.com/2014/04/10/report_extreme_weather_related_blackouts_are_on_the_rise/

The concentration of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that drives climate change, hit 402 parts per million this week — the highest level recorded in at least 800,000 years.

The recordings came from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which marked another ominous milestone last May when the 400 ppm threshold was crossed for the first time in recorded history.

You got it. Seasonal cycles drive natural carbon uptake. Large northern hemisphere land mass means more trees dropping leaves in fall initiates decay and dumps carbon into the system. As the trees aren’t up-taking carbon through winter and as decay over-rides, you end up with rising CO2 levels. As spring takes hold, the cycle starts to reverse, with most land masses engaged in the leaf out you’ve mentioned by mid May. So you have a cycling fall in CO2 levels from that point until autumn returns.

Australia’s BOM has it at 70% now? CPC has yet to update its March findings.

Most recent Kelvin Wave analysis from NOAA still shows strong progression. Will have to wait to see if the trades continue to fade and reverse. We’ve had a number of reversal episodes recently coincident with low pressure development along the equator.

Mark Archambault

Perhaps because I’m a lucky American and not some poor Asian, I’ve been cheering this potential El Nino on in the hope that it acts as a tipping point in goading humanity to act with the degree of seriousness needed to avert the worst case scenarios.

Next winter when we get 36 inches of snow in a nor’easter and a week without power I’ll pay some of my karmic dues for hoping for a strong El Nino.